Category Archives: Sociology

We need better data on loneliness and its effects

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In response to the recent Atlantic cover story “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche, sociologist Eric Klinenberg suggests the data is much less clear than the cover story suggests.

This debate suggests two things:

1. We need better data on loneliness and how it affects people. There are multiple ways that this could be done but perhaps we need a methodological breakthrough. I’ve been thinking lately that we need better ways to know what people do when they are alone. Now, we rely on after-the-fact questions rather than observational data. If we ask the same questions over time (such as the famous one about how many confidants respondents have), we can track changes over time but this also requires interpretation. How much loneliness is acceptable and “normal” before there are adverse effects? Does the importance or effects of loneliness change over the lifecourse? Is loneliness mitigated by other social forces?

2. Without this more conclusive data, I think we end up having a proxy battle over two warring American schools of thought: communitarianism versus individualism. This dates back to the early days of the American experiment. Who is more virtuous, the cosmopolitan city dweller or the self-reliant farmer or frontiersman? Should we all live in urban areas or preserve small town life? Should the government help people get an equal shot at success or help defend people from each other? Should religion be expressed in the public sphere or should it be comparmentalized? Several well-known social science works in recent decades have tackled these divides including the 1985 classic Habits of the Heart.  Both Klinenberg and Marche seem to bring these ideological approaches to their arguments and then look for the data that supports their points. For example, Klinenberg admits that loneliness will be felt by those who live alone but this is desirable because living alone allows for other good things to happen.

Conservative viewpoint: Biggest change in modern society is “the entry of women into the labor market”

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Here is an interesting summary of what conservatives think is the biggest change in American society over the last half century:

The single most important economic and sociological change in our society in modern times has been the entry of women into the labor market. Today, three of every four women of working age are in the labor market — more than double the share a half century ago.

These changes have had a major impact on family life. Less than one out of every four households is “traditional,” with one wage-earner and a stay-at-home spouse. Dual-earner families — with both spouses in the labor market — now constitute more than half of all married couples.

A few quick thoughts:

1. This commentary on the effects of family life really picked up in the 1960s with the Moynihan Report and the “culture of poverty” thesis.

2. The family has changed quite a bit since the 1950s with more children today born to unmarried parents and more people living alone. However, was the 1950s family quite unusual (the product of a postwar economic boom plus the return of servicemen) compared to families in the last few hundred years?

3. Some women did always work, particularly in lower-class families, because their income was needed. Granted, the number of women who work has risen since the mid-1900s.

4. Behind this seems to be the assumption that the nuclear family is the fundamental building block of society. A society with weak families will be a weak society.

Brookings report: zoning laws help lead to school achievement differences

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A new report from the Brookings Institution suggests that zoning laws are behind differences in school achievement:

The report found that students from poorer households tend to go to schools where scores on state standardized tests are lower while more affluent students tend to go to schools with higher test scores. The findings confirm what numerous studies and a recent Sun analysis have also found.

The average student from a low-income family in Las Vegas attended a school that tested in the 43rd percentile. The average student from a middle- or high-income family went to a school that scored in the 66th percentile, according to the report, which used state test score data listed on GreatSchools.org…

Rothwell’s research went further than other studies that looked at socioeconomic data and school performance, however. His report is among the first looking at how zoning policies affect home prices and student access to high-quality schools.

Rothwell argues municipal zoning policies that restrict affordable housing have segregated students from low-income families from their more affluent peers, creating achievement gaps in schools.

Where people can live matters. We tend to have the idea in America that anyone can live anywhere. Theoretically, this is true but economically, this is not possible as it takes quite a bit of money to move to areas with better amenities like high-performing schools. Zoning plays into this by giving local governments control over how land is used. If communities decide that land can only be used for more expensive single-family housing, then housing options are limited. The summary of the full report sums it up this way:

Across the 100 largest metropolitan areas, housing costs an average of 2.4 times as much, or nearly $11,000 more per year, near a high-scoring public school than near a low-scoring public school. This housing cost gap reflects that home values are $205,000 higher on average in the neighborhoods of high-scoring versus low-scoring schools. Near high-scoring schools, typical homes have 1.5 additional rooms and the share of housing units that are rented is roughly 30 percentage points lower than in neighborhoods near low-scoring schools.

Large metro areas with the least restrictive zoning have housing cost gaps that are 40 to 63 percentage points lower than metro areas with the most exclusionary zoning. Eliminating exclusionary zoning in a metro area would, by reducing its housing cost gap, lower its school test-score gap by an estimated 4 to 7 percentiles—a significant share of the observed gap between schools serving the average low-income versus middle/higher-income student. As the nation grapples with the growing gap between rich and poor and an economy increasingly reliant on formal education, public policies should address housing market regulations that prohibit all but the very affluent from enrolling their children in high-scoring public schools in order to promote individual social mobility and broader economic security.

A fascinating argument: eliminating some of the zoning differences across communities would reduce the educational achievement gap. However, zoning is at the heart of local government and municipalities don’t give this up easily.

“Detroit Suburbs Harder”

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A store in the Detroit suburbs is now selling shirts with this phrase: “Detroit Suburbs Harder.”

Detroit Hustles Harder. Three words. A mantra that swaggers at you, bearing an unflinching gaze. A saying that suggests only one answer — just put your head down and work…

Now the Triple Threads t-shirt and printing company in Clawson want some of the myth-making. Thanks to a tip on Facebook, we saw a photo of a new top they’re hawking — “Detroit Suburbs Harder.”

There are some obvious questions here.

How exactly does one ‘suburb?’ Does this verb describe the act of enjoying a lunch in downtown Birmingham or raking leaves in Northville? Or is it a political philosophy eschewing mixed-use development and building re-use for more roads and far-flung McMansion developments?

Assuming “Detroit Suburbs Harder,” does that mean that our suburbs are more suburb-y than those of Atlanta? Are we out-suburbing Orange County and Chicagolandia? Was there a contest here I wasn’t aware of?

And if “Detroit Suburbs Harder,” is this shirt a companion wardrobe piece for people in Detroit who already hustle harder, or a philosophical distinction? Is ‘suburb-ing’ now supposed to be the opposite of ‘hustling?’

Perhaps this isn’t the meaning at all but here is a possible sociological/historical answer: Detroit may indeed be a poster city for suburban development in the United States, particularly for Northeastern and Midwestern cities (even as the prototypical region for suburbs is probably Los Angeles). While Detroit tends to garner attention for its Rust Belt demise in the last half century (see here and here), the suburbs have done decently well. In other words, while the core of the region has experienced difficulty, the suburbs go on. Detroit is known for “white flight” and segregation though recent data suggests more blacks are now moving to its suburbs. The fate of urban Detroit may still be bleak (particularly financially) but its suburbs might hold out for much longer.

The challenges of Going Solo in the suburbs

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Sociologist Eric Klinenberg argues that it is particularly difficult to live alone in the suburbs:

Q: What do cities and the housing industry need to be thinking about in terms of homes for this wave of single people?

A: One thing I worry about is that we have built suburban areas that won’t fit our future lifestyles. I interviewed many older people who live alone in suburban areas who discovered that they weren’t good places to be when their children moved away because they tended not to have good areas for walking and often were far from public transportation. The houses themselves were too big, making them expensive to heat and cool; more house than most people need. And the suburbs are reluctant to retrofit. They don’t want to change their zoning laws to deal with reality.

The thing I’m most concerned about is housing for poor people of any age who wind up living alone. We need to rethink this whole idea of the single-room-occupancy building. I write in my book about one very successful SRO experiment in New York that had a mix of incomes, not just the otherwise-homeless people who today are associated with SROs. It became sort of a vertical village and ended up being replicated in other places.

We need to design more housing like that. But it’s expensive, and cities are strapped for resources. And it’s not like the group that needs it the most has any political clout; they’re the most vulnerable people in our society.

Klinenberg brings up an issue that has been raised for decades: certain age groups don’t do well in the suburbs. If I remember correctly, Herbert Gans brings this up in the classic study The Levittowners and these issues are also raised in Suburban Nation by Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck. These observers suggest two groups are particularly disadvantaged: teenagers who can’t yet drive and who want freedom and the elderly who can no longer drive and are now more isolated in their single-family homes. Both of these groups are united by the necessity of driving in the suburbs and how driving is tied to completing daily subsistence tasks (such as getting food) as well as social interaction.

As Klinenberg suggests, building this kind of alternative housing in the suburbs (and cities) will be difficult. Not only is it expensive but I imagine many suburbanites would not desire such housing near their own houses. At the same time, this is a recognized problem in a number of communities: how can communities help the elderly live in the towns they have spent much of their lives in?

Kotkin on American population shifts: away from California, into “heartland” growth corridors

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One of the biggest (and unsung) shifts in American life since World War II is the population movement away from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt, an area stretching from the Southeast over to California. Joel Kotkin suggests some of these trends are changing, particularly an increase in the flow of people out of California:

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families…

So if California’s no longer the Golden land of opportunity for middle-class dreamers, what is?

Mr. Kotkin lists four “growth corridors”: the Gulf Coast, the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, and the Southeast. All of these regions have lower costs of living, lower taxes, relatively relaxed regulatory environments, and critical natural resources such as oil and natural gas.

Take Salt Lake City. “Almost all of the major tech companies have moved stuff to Salt Lake City.” That includes Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle.

Then there’s Texas, which is on a mission to steal California’s tech hegemony. Apple just announced that it’s building a $304 million campus and adding 3,600 jobs in Austin. Facebook established operations there last year, and eBay plans to add 1,000 new jobs there too.

Kotkin attributes a lot of this to political and social change in California that is threatening the middle class. I wonder if we could look at this in a more positive light rather simply in the negative light Kotkin, a self-admitted “Truman Democrat,” paints California: these other states and areas may just have competitive advantages that they didn’t used to have. For example, the story behind California’s growth is well-known: gold rushes, available land, the rise of Hollywood in the early 1900s, government help such as the opening of military bases and defense contracts and highway construction, the growing connections between the United States and East Asia (Japan, China, Korea, etc.), and the weather. Places like Texas and Salt Lake City have learned how to compete against these factors and offer a different vision of the “good life” that is now appearing more attractive to residents and corporations.

I also wonder if there is a cultural story here. California was the place to go for decades. It was the land of sun, innovation, and fortune. In other words, it was “the cool place to be.” This same story isn’t as appealing today, particularly to conservatives who think of California as a liberal bastion. I don’t think Salt Lake City will acquire the same kind of cultural allure as Los Angeles but it is appealing to some who are looking for a different American narrative. Additionally, places like Austin and other “creative class” communities (Birmingham, AL as another example) offer enough “cool” without having to go to California.

h/t Instapundit

Data guru Hans Rosling named to Time’s 100 most influential people

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Hans Rosling’s talks are fascinating as he makes data and charts exciting and explanatory in his own enthusiastic manner. Named as one of the 100 most influential people by Time, Rosling is profiled by sociologist and MD Nicholas Christakis:

Hans Rosling trained in statistics and medicine and spent years on the front lines of public health in Africa. Yet his greatest impact has come from his stunning renderings of the numbers that characterize the human condition.

His 2006 TED talk, in which he animated statistics to tell the story of socio-economic development, has been viewed over 3.8 million times and translated into dozens of languages. His subsequent talks have moved millions of people worldwide to see themselves and our planet in new ways by showing how our actions affect our health and wealth and one another across space and time.

When you meet Rosling, 63, you are struck by his energy and clarity. He has the quiet assurance of a sword swallower (which he is) but also of a man who is in the vanguard of a critically important activity: advancing the public understanding of science.

What does Rosling make of his statistical analysis of worldwide trends? “I am not an optimist,” he says. “I’m a very serious possibilist. It’s a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.” We can all, Rosling thinks, become healthy and wealthy. What a promising thought, so eloquently rendered with data.

Here are some of Rosling’s presentations that are well worth watching:

–200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes – The Joy of Stats

–TED Talk: No More Boring Data

–TED Talk: The Good News of the Decade?

Here is what The Economist thinks are Rosling’s greatest hits.

I’ve used several of Rosling’s talk in class to illustrate what is possible with data and charts. Rosling gets at an important issue: data should tell a story and be interactive and available to people so they too can dig into it and understand the world better. By simply taking a chart and adding some extra information (like population size of a country displayed as a larger circle or being able to quickly show the quartile income distributions for a country) and the dimension of time, you can start to visualize patterns and possible explanations of how the world works.

(A side note: alas, I don’t think any sociologists were named as one of the 100 most influential people.)

“Facebook as McMansion”

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Amidst the conversation and consternation regarding Facebook’s recent purchase of Instagram, one commentator makes this comparison: “Facebook as McMansion.”

In the flurry of blog posts, tweets and status updates about the Instagram deal, Facebook was likened to Dr. Evil, Foxconn, the North Korean army, and the Evil Empire — precisely the same nickname given to Microsoft in its monopoly phase.

In his (incredibly fun) take on the acquisition for New York magazine, Paul Ford suggested that Facebook buying Instagram was “like if Coldplay acquired Dirty Projectors, or a Gang of Four reunion was sponsored by Foxconn.” He also called Facebook the “great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear,” and likened it to the “monolith in the movie 2001.” Big and scary.

According to BuzzFeed’s Matt Buchanan, “beloathed” Facebook’s purchase of “beloved” Instagram means “the neighborhood just got demolished by giant bulldozers loaded with money and is being paved over with 800 million McMansions.” Facebook as McMansion — a symbol for complacent corporate culture and stodginess if there ever was one…

We love an underdog, and we’d probably love Facebook more if we thought it were one. While snapping up Instagram allowed Facebook do to away with a competitor, it may be that a rival — or even the illusion of one — is exactly what it now needs.

While the other comparisons aren’t exactly flattering, the comparison to a McMansion is not a good thing for Facebook. Although the term McMansion has multiple meanings, it is clearly a negative label and is tied to these ideas: excessively large, much larger than “average homes,” and a one size fits all approach.

Perhaps these comparisons are getting at a larger issue: is there a point when Facebook plateaus or continuously encounters widespread pushback because it is too big and/or too popular? There will always be a small group of people who dislike the dominant company or product just because it is the biggest and can throw its weight around. At the same time, there could be competitors who arise or circumstances online and with computers that change in such a way that Facebook is left behind. See the case of Microsoft who still has a lot of products and influence certainly its way past its peak.

Two common uses of the word McMansion: to describe teardowns, tied to larger issues of consumption

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Earlier this week, I ran across two articles from two major newspapers that illustrate two of the definitions of McMansions.

1. The term McMansion can often refer to teardowns. In the Chicago Tribune, an interesting overview of teardowns in several North Shore communities in the Chicago suburbs uses the term this way:

Critics often pair “tear-down” with the pejorative term “McMansion,” coined more than 15 years ago to describe quickly built, super-sized structures that replace more modest homes. Some neighbors complain that once a home is torn down, there is seldom an effort to blend its replacement with the surroundings…

But now tear-downs seem to be rebounding. Last year, the village [of Winnetka] issued 28 demolition permits. Through March of this year, the village received 10 applications for permits, according to Ann Klaassen, a village planning assistant…

The factors behind the new upswing have changed from a decade ago, when developers and speculators were driven by easy profits. Tear-downs now seem to be the result of the foreclosures that left homes deteriorating.

Whatever the cause, Follett says tear-downs threaten the North Shore’s historic housing stock.

But builders call it a positive sign of an economy finally getting back on its feet, and argue that many buyers just prefer new homes over renovation jobs.

The key here is that teardown = McMansion plus the term McMansion is used as an effective piece of negative rhetoric. This is quite a different idea than a McMansion being built on a cul-de-sac in an exurb. These North Shore communities have a long history and an aging housing stock. The battle over teardowns is taking place in many communities across the United States and one tool at the disposal of preservationists and those who wish to avoid this architecturally incongruent new homes is to label them McMansions.

2. In contrast, an op-ed column in the New York Times about obesity and eating habits in the United States ties McMansions to other objects of excessive consumption:

I lived in Western Europe—in Rome—for two years. And I happen to be in Western Europe—in Lisbon—as I write. And in this part of this continent there’s a different attitude and set of signals about the appropriate amount of food a person should eat than there are in America.

In restaurants and at dinner parties here, portions are much, much smaller. And, seeing them, no one cries foul about insufficient value or inadequate hospitality. We Americans somehow imprinted our nation’s historical and famous “bigger-is-better” mentality onto the way we eat. Our Costco purchases and our supersized meals mirror our S.U.V.s and McMansions: they’re assertions of wealth and expressions of comfort through sheer size.

This matters. Because if, indeed, our evolutionary nature is to grab and gorge on food when it’s there, then we’re best served in the current era of abundance by cultural cues that try to condition us in the opposite direction.

This is a common argument: American culture promotes the idea “bigger is better” and this applies even to our food. But particularly interesting to me is the link between McMansions, Costco, supersized fast food meals, and SUVs. When this argument is made, these objects often are placed together, perhaps to show how pervasive this American mentality is: it covers where we live, what we eat, what we drive, and where we shop. In other words, McMansions are an easy to spot symbol of a larger American issue of excessive consumption.

Overall, I would argue that these are just two of the meanings of the word McMansion. These two articles do illustrate the idea that when people use the term McMansion they don’t necessarily mean the same thing.

My recent work on McMansions is discussed in The Atlantic Cities

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Read this story on The Atlantic Cities to get a summary of my recent publication on McMansions. While the article in the Journal of Urban History is not yet in print, it is available online. Here is the abstract:

The single-family home is a critical part of the American Dream, and there has been a long conversation about what houses mean and symbolize. As American homes have grown larger, some of these newer homes have been called McMansions. This study examines the use of this term in the New York Times and Dallas Morning News between 2000 and 2009 and shows that McMansion is a complex term with four distinct meanings: a large house, a relatively large house, a home flawed in architecture or design, and a symbol for more complex issues including sprawl and excessive consumption. The author argues that the usage and meaning of the term differs by metropolitan context, suggesting there may not be a singular national process of “mansionization,” and provides three suggestions for the future study of McMansions.

I’ve posted a lot about McMansions on this blog and many of these thoughts are based on this analysis.